It has come to my attention that in the previous instalment I neglected to name my fortress. Welcome back, therefore, to as-yet unglorious Roughrewards, newest colony of the Sunken Attic.

If you’re thinking the fortress name is pretty good and the civilisation name is a little underwhelming, you’re not alone.

When last we left our brave and stupid dorfs, they were busy attempting to punch to death a fully-grown if unconscious alligator and making little headway against its thick scales.

Fearing that they might expire from exhaustion and dehydration whilst flogging this dead horse, I created a second squad containing my miners, reasoning that they might attack it with their picks. Nope: they too joined the punching party. Presumably they also gouge rock and soil from the very earth with their bare hands.

Eventually I gave up, disbanded all military squads and set a burrow. This worked, in that the dwarfs stopped punching the poor reptile. After a short period, during which the alligator neither expired nor moved, I cancelled the burrow and marked the wagon to be dismantled. A few dwarfs got a little spooked by the beast but this didn’t seem to stop their efforts to fetch items for our new stockpile.

I spent a little while designating new areas to be dug out and watching as my dwarfs lugged items back and forth. As you can see from the above screenshots I’m currently playing the game vanilla – no custom tilesets or fonts – but it remains compelling just to watch the simulation tick.

When I next checked on our scaled friend, I paused the game in sudden horror. It was gone. Reassuring myself that there were no new combat reports, I tracked it down using the Units list and found the creature slowly limping southwards. I watched it as it exited the map, and felt a brief moment of regret for what might have been.

In retrospect, looking at the incident from the reptile’s perspective, it was wronged in all this. First our idiotic expedition leader sticks their hands into the river right in front of it, inviting attack whilst attempting to pillage the creature’s own food source. Then when it does what instinct compels it toward, it does little more than gash a dwarf in the leg and a dog in the… in the false ribs? Okay. Sure. And then in response it is punched at least 700 times whilst it fades in and out of consciousness. During all this three of its toes explode in gore and its neck is somehow ripped open.

Dwarf Fortress: never proportionate, ever.

Anyway, how about a few shots of the shitty hovel that is Roughrewards?

Here is the entrance with a ramp going lower, west of the wagon, river and memorial alligator bloodpatch:

The entryway tunnel precedes to an area I’ll later use for a trade depot, a stairwell leading down, a farm plot and a stockpile.

Two levels below we find an initial set of what will become bedrooms. I have plans for a grand hall to the east, which will be used as meeting area and dining room.

Whilst digging this lot out we struck chert and bauxite, two of the bajillion different kinds of rock that the game’s terrifyingly broad or deep – how would I know which? both? – geological simulation features. I also remembered to make a wood stockpile and to allow corpses in my refuse pile, which almost immediately results in this:

I have no more idea than you do. I guess the cats got ’em.

A few weeks back I grew obsessed with Dwarf Fortress. I blame one of my workplace proximity associates, because he started talking about the Villain Update when we were at lunch. Thoughtless bastard.

After a few weeks of watching YouTube Let’s Plays (mostly by Kruggsmash) and re-reading diaries (mostly Glazedcoast and Onionbog) I decided it was time to actually play the game. Last time I tried it didn’t go so well. Dwarf Fortress’s interface is famous for two things: being extremely difficult to get on with, and being functional and logical once you’ve become accustomed to its many idiosyncrasies. It is an interface that flies in the face of contemporary ideas about user experience. The game also uses pseudo-ASCII art so, like, who cares?

After generating a new world and searching for the recommended newbie embark site – soil or clay, shallow and deep metals, serene or calm surroundings, some woodland or trees, and most importantly no bloody aquifer – I embarked with the default loadout. Strike the earth!

The first thing one should do when beginning a game of Dwarf Fortress is check out your immediate surroundings. My dwarfs were clustered on a hilly plateau, apparently many z-levels above sea level. The hill towered upwards still further to their west, which is great as it gives me some soft soil or rock to dig into for an initial entrance. To the east of my dwarfs lay a fast-flowing river, perfect for fresh water.

Elsewhere there were plenty of trees dotted about, and the grass looked like normal grass rather than, say, eyeballs on stalks. All good. The list of creatures in the area was slightly more concerning: seven hippos and an alligator. The hippos worried me as these animals can easily kill humans if they are disturbed, and I figure that they could pulp an idiot dwarf without breaking their stride. The alligator, listed as an ambush predator, worried me less. It was sat in the river nearby, but so long as no one went near it I should be fine.

Another thing it’s recommended that new players do with the default embark loadout is disable everything to do with fishing or hunting while you get your initial rooms dug out. This prevents dwarfs wandering about and, say, aggroing ambush predators in the nearby river. It’s a good tip, so I disabled everything that was recommended. I also made my fish cleaner work as a miner, as the fish cleaner is generally considered the most useless worker in the default loadout, and two miners makes mining faster.

Next I designated a 3 block wide corridor with a sharp turn in it – wide enough for a trade caravan, long enough to give me some room to assemble defences – leading to a 5×5 trade area, a 3×3 area for use as a stairwell, and a 12×12 stockpile. Once that is dug out I’ll move on to a dormitory or rooms, farms, and space for various workshops and stills. Baby steps, though. Finally, I designated a bunch of trees to be chopped down. There are as yet no elves to tell us off for this.

With everything designated, it was time to unpause the game and let my dwarfs get to it!

It all went rather well, until about three seconds had passed and my fisherdwarf walked right up to the river and was attacked by the alligator. For fuck’s sake, man. Didn’t I– oh. No. No, I didn’t disable his fishing labour.

Like I said, the interface is pretty complicated. But this screw-up was on me.

I decided to react by assembling a military squad, aka. a crack team of loyal dregs. I allocated a couple of dwarfs – everyone except my miners and woodcutter was standing about uselessly anyway – to a squad and ordered them to kill the alligator. After unpausing, they enthusiastically attacked the creature. Unarmed.

It turns out that a dwarf is entirely willing to punch an alligator repeatedly, and indeed is capable of bruising every single part of its body and even knocking it unconscious. Unfortunately, it is also rather difficult to kill an alligator this way. And even an unconscious alligator will interrupt the task of any dwarf who came anywhere near it. Did I mention the stupid bloody reptile had hauled itself onto the land and was currently sprawled in a pool of blood right next to my wagon?

At this point my “military” have been punching the alligator for what must be several in-game weeks, and it’s no closer to being dead. There are thirty pages of combat logs, each line stating that the alligator has a new bruise. I dread to visualise this. But my biggest concern is that whilst unarmed dwarfs can’t kill a creature like this, they will not stop trying. If they keep at it for long enough, they can actually die of dehydration. Whilst punching a freshwater reptile. Next to a river.

Smells like Dwarf Fortress!

Next time: how to defeat an unconscious alligator, I try not to fuck up channelling, and possibly some screenshots of our mountain hovel.

God help me, I started playing Fallout 4 again.

I wrote about Fallout 4 for Arcadian Rhythms some three and a half years ago. I was, broadly, positive. After writing that rambling screed I soured on the game in the same way that I did with Bethesda’s Skyrim. I also wrote about the latter falling out of love experience, and much of what I say about Skyrim is applicable to Fallout 4, for all that my 2016 piece dissembles over my volte-face.

And yet here I was, a scant few years later, playing again. Why, Shaun? Why?

The initial impetus is easy to explain: I bought an Xbox One X, I own a 4K TV, I wanted to check out some pretty games, Fallout 4 has dynamic 4K support and some other rendering bells and whistles, and was free on Xbox Game Pass. So I downloaded it and pootled about a bit in the opening area, expecting I’d soon uninstall.

I didn’t.

So there I found myself again: forty or more hours into a playthrough, with that teeth-grindingly tedious Bethesda core loop (go place, kill shit, collect junk, go home, dump junk, repeat) having sunk its blunted teeth into my skin. It couldn’t draw blood, but somehow it left an impression. Damn it, Shaun. Why?

There’s a lot about Fallout 4 I actively dislike. Fallout‘s RPG DNA is non-existent at this point in the series. The dramatic gore of ‘cinematic’ VATS doesn’t look good, mainly thanks to the camera’s idiot behaviour. Somehow, melee combat is even less interesting than the game’s limp gunplay. Repeating the same quests I dimly remember from three years ago is immediately dull.

Let’s not even talk about the writing. Most characters feel as dead as the world around them. The main story is completely at odds with everything else in the game. Rarely is an interesting choice offered via dialogue. Said dialogue is at best passable, and typically tedious. Most quests have a bare minimum of narrative context wrapped around them, meaning even the quests which aren’t procedurally generated often feel as if they are.

So what do I like? Well, I tried Fallout 76 for a laugh, and Fallout 4‘s a masterpiece in comparison to that dead-on-arrival nightmare.

Wait, no, that’s not a thing I like.

I enjoyed spending time with systems I’d largely ignored previously. I built up my settlements by constructing ramshackle buildings, lighting systems and defensive chokepoints. This was actually rather fun, although there’s little purpose to it and the interface spends more time being irritating than enabling creativity.

Sometimes an area evidences care invested in the story of that place and its long-dead residents. Typically assembled by reading logs on computer systems, this can occasionally be an engaging part of exploration.

I like the music. The Fallout series’ juxtaposition of classic pop with the post-apocalyptic has always worked well, even if it’s moved from dramatic irony to pure kitsch as the series has gotten stupider.

I think that might be about it.

I was even stupid enough to buy the DLC, wondering if what it promised might actually feel more “fresh”. Not particularly! It’s the same familiar gameplay loops and absences. In terms of the broad strokes, I’d seen it all before. There’s no longer even a trace of novelty to justify my time spent. And yet there I was, spending money to try and justify playing Fallout 4 again.

Maybe I was doing this because I’m often tired. My job takes up a lot of mental energy most days and I don’t take many breaks, so when I get home in the evening my brain just wants to slump. Fallout 4 could not be more of a junk food game. No matter the session length, that bitty core loop and the secondary gameplay loops mounted to it like fascinators provide a sense of progression: stuff acquired, new place explored, experience points gained, settlement improved, etcetera. I could play it for fifteen minutes or one hundred and fifty. I might not even notice the difference.

Is that it? Is that really it? I played Fallout 4 again because it’s mindlessly comforting for me, because my brain is dulled and craves the comfort of the familiar and unchallenging? If true, is that how I want to spend my time? I’m approaching forty, for fuck’s sake: is this truly who I want to be?

Even while I was playing Fallout 4 I was eagerly anticipating when I stopped and moved on to something better. Now I have. So if you see me mindlessly indulging again, like a lapsing addict, please call me on it. I can’t see any other reason why I might go back again beyond feeling so weak that the empty pleasure of that mindless core loop is all I feel capable of seeking.